After years of LRT construction city to rip up Eglinton for bike lanes

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Residents and business owners along Eglinton Ave. would be forgiven for thinking someone at City Hall hates them. With the construction of the Eglinton Crosstown LRT project just about complete and the road getting back to normal, the city wants to tear it all up again.

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It’s all part of the eglintonTOday Complete Street Project that looks to transform the roadway from Bicknell Ave. to Mount Pleasant Rd.

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The project will begin as a road resurfacing project before morphing into something that will completely change the structure of the roadway and how residents get around. The city’s planning department wants Eglinton Ave. to be “a complete street with wide sidewalks, raised bikeways, motor vehicle parking and rapid transit.”

What does that mean in practical terms?

Really, it depends on where you live along the avenue, but a general rule will be less room for cars and plenty more for bikes. The plan is for raised and separated bike lanes along the full route of nearly eight kilometres.

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If you are in a car, be prepared for things to change as you go from west to east.

In the west end, between roughly Keele St. and Caledonia Rd., there will be two westbound lanes for cars and one eastbound lane for driving with some parking on the eastbound side. Between Caledonia and Oakwood Ave., it changes to one lane in each direction for driving and one lane on each side for parking.

The road switches again from Oakwood to Spadina Rd., with two lanes in each direction for driving during peak hours and parking on each side during off-peak times. Between Spadina and Mount Pleasant, there would be one lane in each direction for driving, one lane for parking on alternate sides and, of course, the bike lanes each way.

Along the way, there will also be streetscaping carried out, often in conjunction with various business improvement associations.

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Congratulations, residents of the areas around Eglinton, you’ve put up with more than a decade of construction for an LRT that still doesn’t run, and now you get more of the same.

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This is all being carried out as part of the city’s Vision Zero Road Safety Plan, TransformTO Net Zero Strategy and Cycling Network Plan — all of which sounds lovely but most of us weren’t consulted about. The list of people and organizations who sent in communications to the city on this new plan reads like the cycling lobby hall of fame.

The Toronto Community Bikeways Coalition, Cycle Toronto, Women’s Cycling Network, Etobicoke Cycling Club, Cycle Don Valley Midtown and Toronto East Cyclists all participated, as did anti-car environmental groups like the David Suzuki Foundation. There were also form emails in support of the project submitted by hundreds of people in an obviously organized campaign.

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What you don’t find in the reams of communications are the views of average residents who have to drive to work, have to drive for mobility reasons or just want to get their kids to swimming lessons or soccer practice.

The folks at City Hall are prioritizing bike lanes over all other modes of transportation. We’ve done this along Bloor St., and up Yonge St. through midtown, despite the comparative lack of traffic most of the year.

If you stop and watch who is using the bike lanes in most parts of the city, what you will quickly realize is that we are spending millions on this infrastructure to make life easier for Uber Eats and Door Dash delivery personnel. That’s who is using the bike lanes most of the time, not average residents trying to get around — it’s someone with a thermal backpack rushing a hot meal to you.

The city is broke, it can’t provide core services properly, but there is always money for bike lanes to get you that food delivery faster.

Eglinton, you are next, enjoy another year or two of construction.

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